A proud unapologetic Black trans woman speaking truth to power and discussing the world around her since 2006

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Houston Po-Po's Behaving Badly And...

Getting away with it so far.

I wrote a post last February about an ugly incident in which Houston Police Department officers were caught on videotape beating teenage robbery suspect Chad Holley while taking him into custody in March 2010

The four HPD officers involved, Andrew Blomberg, Phil Bryan, Raad Hassan and Drew Ryser were indicted on misdemeanor official suppression charges and terminated. Bryan and Hassan also were terminated from HPD and charged with violation of the civil rights of a prisoner, also a misdemeanor.

Andrew Blomberg, the first of the officers to be tried went in front of an all white jury this week at the Harris County Courthouse on those misdemeanor oppression charges. Care to guess what happened in his case when it went to the jury for deliberation at noon CDT Tuesday and returned with the verdict shortly after 11 AM CDT yesterday?

Mayor Annise Parker said, "I do not agree with the verdict. No way he will ever again be a Houston police officer." It's also a sentiment to which HPD police chief Charles McClelland concurs with.

Of course Houston's African-American community and community activists are furious about another instance of Houston po-po's behaving badly and once again being let off the hook by an all-white jury .

African-American community
activists gathered in the hallway outside the courtroom according to th Houston Chronicle yelled
"Racism!" and "Injustice!" after hearing the outcome.

"It is pathetic. It is unacceptable," the Rev. James Dixon of the Community of Faith Church
said of the jury's decision. "This kind of expression says to me, to my
children and to every black child in the city, 'Your life is not
worth manure.'"

Quanell X,
the Houston community activist who had released the video of the alleged
beating to the media, called the verdict "wrong" and criticized the lack
of blacks or other minorities on the six-person jury.

"They knew what they were doing with an all-white jury," he said to the Chronicle.

Yep Quanell, another sign of the Apocalypse. For once I agree with you.

Of course, Blomberg's defense attorney Dick DeGuerin tried to tap dance around that inconvenient fact of the melanin-free jury by claiming "it is not and was not a racial thing." but quickly asserting like pees who wallow in vanillacentric privilege that "It's been made into that by others for their own reasons."

When he was asked
according to the Chronicle article why there weren't any blacks or other ethnic minorities on the jury, DeGuerin said
most of the African-Americans in the jury pool had already made up their
minds that Blomberg was guilty.

Oh really Dick DeGuerin? And most of the white jurors in the jury pool didn't have their minds made up that Blomberg was innocent? That's vanilla scented bull feces.

And this kind of racist crap is why many African-Americans not only look side eyed at the po-po's, but in many cases consider our police departments to be the stormtroopers for whiteness and white supremacy.

Well, thanks to the just-us system, we can already guess how the other three trials are going to turn out.

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About The TransGriot

Monica Roberts, AKA the TransGriot (Gree-oh) is a native Houstonian, GLAAD award nominated blogger, writer, and award winning trans human rights advocate. She's the founding editor of TransGriot, and her writing has appeared at the Bilerico Project, Ebony.com, The Huffington Post and the Advocate.
She works to foster understanding and acceptance of trans people inside and outside communities of color and was recently honored with the Virginia Prince Transgender Pioneer Award

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